Friday, July 28, 2017

It's the summer before I move abroad, the lull period before the next phase of my life. WIth very little to do and few obligations to fulfill, I've retreated to television land. Here are some shows I've been enjoying.

1. Finding Carter

A sixteen-year-old girl finds out that the woman who raised her is not her mother, but is, in fact, her kidnapper. Her real family, the one she was taken from at the age of three, lives just two hours away. Talk about an elevator pitch! I can't imagine hearing that premise in those two neat lines and not watching the show. But the best part is that the show goes beyond its premise, and delves into the lives of all its characters. Special shoutout to Maxlor, which is my name for the Taylor-Max ship, and I'm going to write Finding Carter fanfic soon. Too bad the show got canceled, which seems to be a going concern for a lot of great shows.

2. Bunheads

I read about Bunheads in Rainbow Rowell's Landline, in which the MC is an aspiring Amy Sherman-Palladino. I loved Gilmore Girls, but the revival left me a little disappointed, which is why I was skeptical about Bunhead. But guess what? I fell in love with Bunheads, more than Gilmore Girls, and I fell in love with Michelle more than Lorelai (sorry, Lorelai!). It inspired me so much that I started looking for ballet classes in the State College area, and even started writing a few short stories about ballet. Sherman-Palladino is definitely lucky with her leading ladies, and Boo, Ginny, Sasha and Mel were the friends I wished I had in high school. It has some spectacular dance routines and the small town charm that Gilmore Girls had, too. I just wish they'd given more time to mourning Hubbel, and to developing Mel. This show got canceled, too, with a lot left to explore. But Netflix gave us the Gilmore Girls revival, and so, I'm keeping my fingers crossed and hoping the same will be done for Bunheads.

3. Switched at Birth

This show is an 'issues' show, and there's never a time when it's not dealing with some serious problems teenagers and young adults face. But the thing is, it doesn;t feel like an issues show, which was my problem with another hit Freeform show, The Fosters. Also, a huge chunk of it is filmed in ASL, and it serves as bridge between the deaf and the hearing. I loved the alternative route Bay takes to become an artist, and Daphne's aspirations to become a doctor, and also that the show didn't end with neat happily ever afters. It felt like the journey would go on, and the sisters that were switched at birth would always be together.

4. Younger

I forty-year-old woman pretends to be a twenty-six-year old to land a job in the ageist publishing industry. That's another great elevator pitch, and a fresh new take on ageism. Sutton Foster (previously on Bunheads) completely sells the idea that she's in her mid-twenties, and I guess if someone didn't know the story, they'd have no reason to suspect otherwise. Our favorite early 2000s star Hilary duff (of Lizzie McGuire fame) plays the best friend/co-worker. I know a lot of it will look down upon a show that's reminiscent of SATC, but the reality is, that this is a show about women, for women, and that doesn't make a show frivolous.

I'll be on the lookout for more shows to watch, but I really hope I don't come across more great shows that, in my opinion, got cancelled before their time. It really says a lot about how quality of entertainment has very little to do with its life span.

Are there any shows you like that got canceled? Let me know in the comments.

Now, I don't mind start-ups, even though I don't have the inclination or ability to start one. My problem is with the fact that today, startups are being presented to us a solution to all our problems. In an age when all things Internet are the definition of cool and a generation whose heroes are Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, startups have become the generational dream. You just start a business on the Internet, code like a boss to set up the site, and suddenly you're the next big thing and maybe you're helping people and decreasing unemployment. Startups peddle the hipster-y image in which offices are relaxed, bosses are cool and hey, every day is casual Saturday. It's hip, it's cool, it's fun and it makes money. Startups feel like the next big thing that's pull us out of....I don't even know what, and a lot of people are buying into this dream.

It's time I tell you why I have a problem with this startup craze and bear with me here while I, a non-economist and non-sociologist, explain why the 'startup dream' is problematic. I guess that clarifies that I have an issue with the startup dream and not the basic idea of startups, or even the great startups that went on to make a difference in my life.

A few months ago, I met an old friend after having no contact with her for 8 years. During all the catching up conversations we kept running into the 'what are you planning to do with your life' topic. I explained to her that even though I haven't thought too seriously about it, having a small architecture firm of my own would be nice. She looked at me and said, "So,,,like a startup?" And I didn't know why she needed to bring the term into a discussion about good old fashioned architecture firm. Is that the term one would use for a new law firm or a medical practice? I am guessing not. So I assumed that the problem with her understanding lay either in her idea of a startup or her limited knowledge of service-providers and businesses that have been operating for decades in this world without the need for a special name.

See, I believe that we've been led to believe that startups are something new and different when in reality, they entrepreneurial ventures just like all the entrepreneurial ventures that came before. The basic idea is still to do business, right? B-U-S-I-N-E-S-S with a capital B. But that's not how startups are being presented to us. Instead, they are being presented to us as an alternative lifestyle, an alternative to cold hard business sometimes. Startups are more commonly associated with the tech space. From the outside, it looks like startups are all about coming up with creative concepts and coding and changing lives, but it's also about balance sheets and profit margins and customer acquisition costs and marketing budgets. But how many people actually think about all that while dreaming up their next-big-thing internet startup? How many times do the Gates' and Zuckerbergs and Musks of the world lay off on the all the philosophical speeches and talk about this aspect of their work?

Another problem with people' interpretation of a startup is that the term has become associated with youth, which means that everyone is in a hurry to start. In my observation what that has done is that it has limited people's ability to actually come up with ideas that will help people when implemented on the suggested platform. Any invention or business is about innovation. A semester of classes in Entrepreneurship has taught me that any kind of entrepreneurial activity is all about innovation. But the key to innovation is to observe the needs and difficulties of people around us, and coming up with a solution that can be implemented to reach and be accepted by a reasonably large target market. This can't happen if you've already decided to go the startup route or have had that dream for a long time, before coming up with an innovative idea. What that does is cause people to develop a cool product or idea, and then try to find a market for it, which (apart from a few exceptional case) is the backwards way of going about it. A lot of people take a few personal experiences and work on a startup around those experiences, without thinking about all the stakeholders.

If you're thinking about a startup, or have already started one. have you thought about the following things:

1. Who will be your direct competitors?
2. Who are all the stakeholders?
3. What is the target market?
4. Who could potentially be your investors?
5. Do you have any competitive advantages?
6. How big is the gap in the market that you are aspiring to fill?

Have you honestly answered these questions yet? Without cheating on the answers to convince yourself that your startup will work? If yes, good. You're probably on the right track. If no, think about these questions, be brutally honest while answering them and if you can't find the answers maybe you have a little bit more work to or maybe you don't like the business aspect of things, in which case you'll at the very least need a strategic partner who really is thinking about financial success.

Let's not ignore the fact that startups, more often than not, fail. It's a fact that can evade us is we're too focused on the success stories, but it's the most important fact to keep in mind. You can't let 'startup' be the keyword of your dream plan and then feel like a failure if it doesn't work out.

So that's my take on the startup craze. But I sincerely do hope that if 's your dream, I hope it works out, and a startup ends up being everything you thought it would be. If there are any stories you'd like to share, the comments section is open...

Monday, April 17, 2017

If you're in the plus-40 age group you've probabaly looked at a teenager or young adult, rolled your eyes, and made a comment about 'today's generation'. You've probably also complained about how attached we are to our cell phones, and how we never look up from those screens, and how we have no appreciation for life outside of the virtual world.

Look, I'm a balanced person. I'm not a tech addict in the sense that you mean. I'm barely on social media and to me, the web and all the electronic gadgets which serve as its channels are merely creative and educational tools sometimes used for entertainment. (TBH, as an architecture student, entertainment is working on drawing on AutoCAD while a movie plays in the background or in a much smaller window). I don't count likes, I don't know what people are posting. I'm just a girl who uses technology because she is belong to her generation and has adapted to the world around her. I have a life outside of the web as well, but I often use my phone or laptop to support it. I exercise regularly and use Youtube for guidance and fitness, I read articles about topics that appeal to me, I discover movies and books from all over the world, and to me, my phone and laptop are tools that help me access so much more.

Recently, I asked one of my professors for a recommendation. He was busy and therefore couldn't get right back to me. A few weeks later, I texted him, saying I need the recommendation ASAP. And then, I went out with some friends for three hours. Just three hours.

Unfortunately, my professor called during those two hours. He called me thrice, with a gap of say ten minutes between calls. I missed these calls and called him back 3 hours later, when I was back home. His response was cold. I'll paraphrase what he said- How dare you not pick up my phone when I called? How dare you call back three hours later?

A similar incident happened a year ago. A friend of mine didn't have cell service for a while. His mother started calling his friends to check up on him and I didn't realize it because I was busy doing some very important paperwork at my university. When I called her back, she barely deigned to speak to me till I explained the entire situation to her like I had committed a huge crime.

Grown ups, go back to the time when you were our age. There were no cell phones back then. People managed. It wasn't just cell phones that were absent, it was also the expectation to be heard whenever we had something to say. You didn't expect to call someone at one o' clock in the afternoon and pick up just like that. We were mindful of the right time to call. And we respected that other people, no matter young or old, have their own schedules they need to attend to before catering to us.

I don't spend every waking minute with my phone. In some ways you'd agree that's a good thing. But not when I miss your call or am late in texting you back. How does that make sense? Am I supposed to keep an eye on my phone when I am at a social gathering? When I am walking across a busy intersection? When I'm studying? When I'm charging my phone?

I guess what I am trying to say is that no matter how accessible people become through technology, there will always be boundaries. There will always be the disappointment of calling someone only to have it ring on for a minute. It's nothing to take personally. If they call you back, they're not ignoring you or disrespecting you. They're probably just busy. I think the whole point of being connected through cell phones and all its services is that it enables us to schedule points in time when both parties are free. That's the way life gets easier.

SO next time you call up a kid and they don't answer back right away, don't mind so much. They're busy not being slaves to technology, just like you told them to be.

Yours sincerely,
A 23-year old normal person

P.S.: If they don't call you back, you have every right to mind. Hey, these youngsters can't just get away with everything, okay?

Thursday, February 16, 2017

In the beginning of her talk, Mariana talks about how, when she was a kid, she was bullied at her summer camp in Minnesota, America. Well, maybe 'bullied' isn't the right word. It's just that the other kids seemed to think she was different with a capital-D, and this difference not only made her stand out, but it also gave the other kids the right to have an opinion about her background and her accent. She had come from a land far, far away, at least in the eyes of the other summer campers, and to them, laughing at Mariana's broken English wasn't mean. It was the natural reaction.

It reminded me of my childhood. I am a Bengali girl who grew up in New Delhi, which doesn't sound very exotic in today's expatriate riddled world. But the thing is, that in my five- to thirteen-year old eyes, I was different. I was the kid who was having just a little bit more difficulty learning Hindi than all the other kids, especially when it came to learning the elementary school Hindi slang. My family didn't eat the same things everyone else's did, they didn't have the same folklore and anecdotes to share, my cousins lived far away. It was all small, harmless, but they were differences. Most of the time I had no issues with being different. We were prabashi Bangalis, Bengalis who live outside of West Bengal. But like the movie Piku, it's very true that you can take a Bengali out of Bengal but you can't take the Bengal out of the Bengali. We lived with one foot in our home state, and one foot in the state our address categorized as our home.

There are a lot of Bengalis living in New Delhi. In fact, these days, in our cosmopolitan world, moving away to another state is the norm. But believe me when I say that it didn't feel like that to me back in the day. Most of my classmates were north Indians. There families belonged to Delhi, Punjab, Uttar Pradesh, sometimes Rajasthan. There was one or two other Bengali and South Indians kids I knew, but we were clearly in the minority.

And we knew this because there were lots of times when my friends would ask me to speak Bengali for them like it was some kind of party trick. They commented on my diet, about how it must have only consisted of fish and sweets. Anything in my tiffin box that they couldn't instantly recognize was labeled Bengali dish. Some of the relatively meaner went ahead and told me that Kolkata (capital of West Bengal) was the dirtiest, most uncivilized place in the world. They talked about how I belonged to a place less developed than the city my parents had decided to move to, and to them, I would always be the outsider. These incidents were not an everyday occurence, but they happened often enough, I didn't understand it at the time, because India, by definition, is full of diversity. Every state is different, so how could it be that my origins were perceived as unusual, while my classmates were the norm?

I slowly came to realize that for a lot of kids in my school in Delhi, speaking Hindi at home was normal. Normal. A word tied so tightly to the word accepted. To them, what they were was the right cultural background, and everything else was alien. To them, being North Indian was the default, and in this case, default is a strange word.

Maybe it didn't get to me, but a lot of my friends were affected by being singled out because of their 'different' cultural background. As adolescents, they all but abandoned their cultural heritage. They claimed not to know their own language, refused to speak anything but Hindi and English, downplayed their own festivals and traditions. They wanted to be cool, and being cool meant assimilating. Yes. It is possible to have to assimilate in your own country.

Then I went to Mumbai, and for a while, things seemed better. Seemed. My friends had their origins in many different states in India. But it soon became clear to me that the same perceptions existed, just in a different way. One day, my best friend overheard me talking to my mother in Bengali. We were on the phone, and I placed my hand on the receiver as I mumbled in Bengali a reply to some question my mother had asked. When I returned to my conversation with my best friend, she was evidently perturbed. She asked me what I had said to my mother, and at first seemed offended that I had chosen to speak a language she didn't speak. Then, it felt as if she was just uncomfortable. One part of my life that was different from hers didn't sit right with her, and she needed a few minutes to come to terms with the fact that I wasn't default.

Finally, I came to Kolkata for college. Yes, people here believe Bengali is the best language to have ever existed. And North Indians here seem to be a separate community, with its invisible walls separating it from the Bengali community. The North Indians maintain their culture, are never ashamed it. Yes, they learn our language, but not at the cost of slowly, over the course of one or two generations, forgetting their own. Perhaps I am biased. Since I'm in a city where my roots lie anyways, I can't feel the pressure of being different. But this is my observation, and I hope you bear with me on this one.

Sometimes I wonder if Hindi speaking states believe themselves to be the default, the ones that define normalcy. To them everything else is marginalized. As mean and judgmental as I sound, I think this is nobody's fault. How did my Bengali friends in Kolkata learn to speak Hindi? By watching Bollywood movies and Hindi television shows. That was mainstream entertainment. The kind of entertainment our grandparents liked could be found on the Regional Entertainment section of the set top box menu. Anything other than Hindi was 'regional'. Culturally, it feels a lot like being marginalized.

If you're having difficulty understanding this, consider this analogy. When you go to a bookstore like Starmark or Crossword, you'll note that Indian authors have a separate category for themselves in their own country. There work isn't just mystery or thriller or humor, it's characteristically defined as Indian, as if Indian is a genre and books written be international authors are the default. Tell me that doesn't seem strange to you.

What I'm talking about here is that no matter how diverse our country is, how much we know that we're all different and that's a good thing, we are still unable to break out of the convention of segregating cultures to mainstream and marginalized. It's engrained in us, and its what we pass on to our children. It serves to tell us that maybe bigotry is in all of us, in different degrees, and even if you don't publicly demean large groups of people, there's a chance you still haven't reached that stage where you can look at a person and see differences as the normal course of being. Now, like any under-researched blogger who is too under qualified to have a book deal, I don't really have a solution to this problem. Maybe a certain section will always be mainstream and all others just...enough to widen someone's eyes. But I do want to point out the situation as a problem till we're all so assimilated to whatever is the norm that there are no differences anymore, not even the differences that we celebrate.

Wednesday, January 11, 2017

Saturday, January 7, 2017

I care about the fact that I am a girl, something that is probably evident in my recent blog posts. I have always dealt with my sex as a factand not a situation. I am equally privy to both the injustices as well as the special favours bestowed upon my gender. I don't make a guy carry my bag or insist upon a "ladies first" kind of treatment. When in need of assistance, I ask for help as a human being, not a female. I recognize when good things are said about me just because someone likes the way I look or dress, and those are the compliments I don't take seriously. However, I will never insist that physical appearance can't be a somewhat unfair advantage in a society that unfairly and harshly judges women for the way they look. I am grateful that, for the most part, once people get to know me, I am treated as an individual, without the label of 'girl' being the dominant determinant of how I am treated among friends.

Needless to say, I listen to what people say about women and feminism, even when I don't agree with what is being said. These days it seems like actress Emma Watson is the most popular feminist out there. Guess what? I am not too happy about that, something that I have no intention of hiding. My openness about my dissatisfaction with one of the so-called most beautiful women in the world has invited many accusations - that I just don't get it, that I am a femi Nazi, and worst of all, that I am jealous (because all girls are programmed to be jealous of other girls, right? And that's why all our magazines have pictures of, well, girls).

Today, I am here to explain my thoughts about this, and trust me, this is not some sentiment-based argument. I have tried to be logical here because, well, I believe that equality is fundamentally tied to logic.

Here's a video which quite accurately talks about why Emma Watson is so popular:

I agree with most of the things that are said in the video. Here's the honest truth about Emma Watson, that she's not really praised for her acting skills (let's just admit that she is a mediocre actress), and most of the attention surrounding her has to do with her looks and charm and 'dignity'. But there are some issues at play here. For example, I can't see the same video ever being made about a man. Well, I don't know about you, but when we're praising men, we don't list the same character traits, do we? We talk about the great work they have done, how exceptionally talented they are in their chosen field, how their techniques make them stand apart from their contemporaries, the power they wield in society, the money they make, how they lead! But when we're talking about girls, we are much more likely to use words like 'charming,' 'dignified,' 'sweet,' 'soft-spoken,' and 'elegant.' Don't get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with these personality traits and one must strive for them to the best of their abilities, but it appears to me that even today, women are meant to be put on a pedestal for their looks and 'pleasantness,' while the same isn't true for men. Not to mention the fact that some of these traits can be argued to be God-given and not exactly based on achievements.

I know I'm going on about the looks part a lot, so let me explain. Emma Watson is a United Nations Goodwill Ambassador, whatever that entails. And I looked through the list of goodwill ambassadors and I saw that it was full of good-looking women. I mean, I could start with how none of the more popular ambassadors are men, which could be an issue, or how all of them are a able-bodied, relatively wealthy, and a certain kind of beautiful. And it feels to me that the job is less about being heard and more about being looked at. And I guess at some point, people started attacking feminists, using words like 'dyke' and 'lesbian' and 'butch'. I kid you not, there have been accusations that feminists are the way they are because they're not attractive enough and can't get men to like them. So I guess the whole point of the 'He For She' campaign was that, hey, we'll get every guy's dream girl to come and be a feminist so that people don't think that feminists are angry, butchy spinsters anymore.

I can sympathize with this, but most actresses are sexualized, objectified ladies, and this isn't necessarily their fault, so I'm not blaming Watson here. They're paid to look good, to pose for magazine covers, to talk about how to achieve the perfect body for bikini season. Maybe it's the society's perception at fault here. Maybe it's the media. But the point is that feminists were fighting this. They were trying to put all kinds of women in the spotlight, and have all of them be valued equally. And I don't see that at play here.

Then there's the media manipulation. There was news a while back that Emma Watson was hiding feminit books on the subway for people to find, and when you read about something like this on BuzzFeed, it sounds adorable, but how much sense does it really make. I can't imagine any real woman ever doing this, and it seems like more of a good headline than anything else, coupled with a promotional opportunity for Watson herself.

It appears to me that the HeForShe campaign wasn't designed to promote feminism. It was designed to make feminism look prettier, to make feminism more media friendly, more male-friendly.

I love Emma Watson. I think she is absolutely gorgeous, and charming, and she seems like a really nice girl to get to know. And when she says she feels passionate about the feminist movement, I believe her. But her being chosen to be the face of the feminist movement and the campaign that she's now part of go on to show how far we still have to go when it comes to promoting equality between all sexes, and I think it's time we acknowledge that.